Category Archives: editors

We are excited to announce that you can now use Bing Streetside photographs when you edit OpenStreetMap using the web-based editor iD! This is the same imagery currently visible on Bing Maps. You can activate the Bing Streetside layer in iD by opening the Map Data pane (shortcut F). The new layer provides 360-degree panoramic imagery across large regions of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Spain. The massive imagery dataset covers approximately 1.6 million kilometers and takes nearly 5PB of storage! Thank you, Microsoft.

Other street-level imagery datasets in iD
This street-level imagery dataset in an addition to the existing ones provided in iD by OpenStreetCam and Mapillary, which you can also activate by opening the Map Data pane (shortcut F).

If you find street photography helpful for OpenStreetMap editing, you can also contribute your own photographs, using the Mapillary and OpenStreetCam smartphone applications. These are developed by companies independent from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

A reminder about photomapping
Are you a new mapper excited about photomapping? Please remember that on-the-ground survey is always superior, as photographs represent a specific time snapshot. Feel free to improve the map using photographs, just keep in mind that the photos might be old. Before changing someone else’s edits, consider contacting the mapper first.

Street-level imagery in other OSM editors
Street-level photographs are also available for improving the map in other popular OpenStreetMap editors, such as JOSM. The Bing Streetside imagery will probably become available in some of these editors soon, so stay tuned!

Happy mapping!

About iDThe iD map editor is an open source project. You can submit bug reports, help out, or learn more by visiting the project page on GitHub.

Behind the scenes the editor code has been made more modular, helping future development and customisation. Bryan Housel has been leading the development effort. Read more on his blog post here. Big thanks to him and all the developers involved.

iD is the default editor appearing on the OpenStreetMap website when you click ‘edit’. Never tried? You’ll need to get signed up and logged in first. Follow the ‘walkthrough’ to learn how ‘iD’ works. This is improving all the time, but there’s also a range of desktop or mobile app alternatives. See the list of editors.

JOSM developers have been running a logo design contest these past few months, and a few days ago they announced a winner. Here’s the brand new logo for JOSM:

Congratulations to Diamond00744 on a great design!

What is JOSM?

JOSM is the “Java OpenStreetMap Editor”. It’s one of several software options you can choose to make edits to OpenStreetMap. The other popular choice is to edit by simply clicking the “edit” button on the website. This is the “iD” editor. By contrast JOSM must be downloaded. It will run as a separate application on your desktop.

Efficiency: edit faster with well thought-out keyboard shortcuts, a powerful search function, filters to hide data you don’t want to edit, and the largest available selection of editing tools of all editors

Validation: make sure your data is clean before you upload by using the built-in validator

Offline editing: save your partially completed work locally, work with your private GPS tracks or photographs without having to upload them

There’s disadvantages too of course. Your choice of editor may come down to personal preference. In general iD is designed as a beginner friendly easier experience for our new users on the website, while JOSM is more feature-rich and popular among experienced mappers. This is reflected in the stats which Oli Wan has been maintaining on the ‘Editor usage stats’ wiki page . He observes that JOSM users are responsible for doing the most editing, despite “iD” reaching the largest number of users.

So if you’ve only tried the “iD” editor, and those advantages sound interesting then maybe you should give JOSM a try. There are various guides and tutorials to help you learn, including the JOSM Guide on the wiki and LearnOSM.org , but firstly download JOSM from josm.openstreetmap.de (It’s lovely new logo is now part of the download as of version 7777) The JOSM website also has the issue tracker and code repository.

If you click the edit button today on OpenStreetMap, you will find a new, easier to use in-browser editor.

With OpenStreetMap rapidly becoming the go-to map for thousands of mobile apps and websites, more and more users are seeking an easy way to add their local knowledge to the map – without the technical background of OpenStreetMap’s early adopters. The new all open source web editor, named iD, was launched last May as an additional option to make the editing experience much easier for first-time mappers.

Since then, the iD developers have worked hard to close feature gaps and improve performance such that it can now take its place as the default editor for OpenStreetMap.org. iD offers a walk-through tutorial for first-time users, inline documentation for tags, and a more comprehensive help system than previous in-browser editors.

Potlatch, the existing online editor, continues to be developed for intermediate-level users and will remain as an option in the edit dropdown. For a full list of available editors, take a look at our wiki. You can configure your personal default in your user settings.

Over a year ago I did a handful of JOSM tutorials ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org /wiki/JOSM ), for example this one on making a simple edit for the first time using JOSM: http://russnelson.com/osm/josm-first-edit-ever.swf , or this one on merging two ways into one: http://russnelson.com/osm/JOSM-merging-ways.mp4 . JOSM has changed since then, and I should probably re-do those tutorials. What tutorials do you think we need to have for JOSM? Are you having trouble using JOSM? Ask questions in the comments below, and I’ll see if I can record a video that answers your question.

The latest JOSM now supports multiple data layers again. This was requested since about the day after I removed the feature over a year ago ;-).

As another big data source hits the main database (AND’s netherland-parts-of-china-and-india map) the feature got more urgent. I think it is especally cool for people who want to compare two unrelated datasets ;-).

Every file open and every download opens the data into a new, seperate layer now. You can merge these layers using the merge button in the layer dialog. By selecting an layer in the layer dialog, you can switch the current editing dataset as needed.

Now for the bad news:

As the feature is a ground shaking one for the whole JOSM data holding structure, I expect many new bugs introduced :-(. If you run into problems that block you from mapping, please revert to the latest release from last week.

For Plugin writers:

Plugins, that used Main.ds could be affected as well. Main.ds now holds the dataset of the current editing layer rather than all the data together. If you are a plugin writer and your plugin is broken and you cannot fix it to work with josm-latest *and* the josm-1.5 release, please link a version which is working with the latest release at http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Plugins/LatestRelease.

after almost 9 months of more or less JOSM-coding, I finally announce a new JOSM release. In shortage of a better name and in spirit of the good old Sam & Max adventure game (which I finished yesterday.. Hurray!), I hereby call this release: “Hit The Road”. 😀

Before I get to the new features, I want to Frederick Ramm, Christof Dallermassl, Francisco R. Santos, Bruce Cowan, Thomas Walraet, Martijn van Oosterhout and all the other guys I forgot who send in patches, bug reports and ideas and who wrote plugins for the community. 🙂

Tons of new modes and tools as split / combine ways, reorder nodes in
a line, reorder segments in a way, (un)select all…

Better support for plugins. There are over a dozen plugins
already available. A basic plugin downloader has been integrated into
JOSM to ease the plugin installation process. Seehttp://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Plugins for more

The MarkerLayer displaying annotations from gpx tracks.

More visualization options, e.g. drawing the segment ordering number
or drawing boundary rectangles of all downloaded areas.

HCI improvements as one-time warnings, customization support for the
toolbar on top (including annotation presets), detach the dialogs
on the right, welcome screen, cuter images…